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nydus/Secret History of the English Occupation of EgyptPublic
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CHAPTER XVIII DUFFERIN'S MISSION

property of most of them was insignificant, and they were allowed to retain property belonging to their wives. The only considerable sufferer pecuniarily was Mahmud Pasha Sami, who had a large estate which he forfeited. As to Arabi, his sole worldly possessions, besides what furniture was in his house at Cairo, a hired one, and some horses in his stable, consisted of the eight acres of good land he had inherited from his father in his native village, to which he had at various time added parcels of uncultivated land on the desert edge, amounting to some six hundred acres, paid for out of his pay in prosperous days. These at the time of the confiscation cannot have been worth much over £2,000 or £3,000, for barren land was then selling for only a few reals the acre, and he had not had time to reclaim or improve them.1

A point, too, which was long disputed, but which is no longer of importance, was whether the paroles of the prisoners were given to the Egyptian or the English Governments. But with these matters I need not trouble myself more than to say that the English Government, having gained its end of getting the rebellion admitted by us, and so a title given for their intervention in Egypt, gave little more help to the defence of certain unfortunate minor prisoners who on various pretexts found themselves excluded from the amnesty, and were

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